BUBBLINE
by C.B. Magique
Summary: A collection of one-shots about the romance between the Vampire Queen and the Bubblegum Princess.
1. Buried

**Disclaimer: I don't own Adventure Time and don't claim to.  
**

**Buried**

It was dark that night as Princess Bubblegum traversed across the Candy Kingdom graveyard still dressed in her science garb. In her hands she gingerly carried her latest project: a beta version of a rejuvenation potion that she had been working on for years. She knew from experience that bringing back the dead wasn't really a good idea, so her new project was very small scale. When she reached her destination she knelt down in front of the little grave. It was so old that nobody remembered who was buried there. The name had been scrubbed away by the weather and there was an empty metal vase sitting in front of it with the blackest, driest, deadest flowers anyone had ever seen. Princess Bubblegum uncapped her bottle and inserted a pipette, drawing up a small drop of her purple serum.

"Carefully, carefully," she said to herself, sticking her tongue out in concentration. If the concoction was applied incorrectly, who knew what would go wrong.

She squeezed out the drop. It fell onto the dried petals of one of the unfortunate flowers in the old bouquet. With a sparkle, it suddenly came back to life. Princess Bubblegum's eyes shone as she gazed at the magnificent white rose that had now returned to full bloom. Its leaves and stem were a deep, rich green and the petals were so pure they could have come from the very peaks of the snowiest mountains. It was a beautiful success.

Bubblegum was about to start using her new serum on all of the dead flowers in the graveyard, thinking only of how happy her subjects would be when they came to mourn their deceased loved ones and found their past offerings as beautiful as when they left them, but was stopped when she heard the deep plucking of a bass being tuned. She pursed her lips and grumbled.

"I only know one person who would play a bass guitar in a graveyard in the middle of the night. Doesn't she have any manners?"

Bubblegum capped her serum and followed the systematic sound of tuning, followed by some scales and chords. The warm up was accompanied by haunting vocal warm-ups that Bubblegum wouldn't admit sent chills up her spine. Walking around a bush, she finally found who she was looking for sitting between the wings on the back of stone angel. She began to play a familiar song on her red axe bass that Bubblegum could see as clear as day in the light of the full moon.

"_Ladada, dada,  
I wanna bury you in the ground.  
Ladada, dada,  
I wanna bury you in my sound." _

Bubblegum frowned. "Oh, brother. She's playing that distasteful song again. And in a graveyard. Where's her respect for the dead?"

"_I wanna drink the red  
From your pretty pink face.  
I wanna lay drink the red  
From the rose I lay upon your grave  
Because now no one will know~"_

The pink princess stepped out into the open to confront the vampire queen but stopped in her tracks. Marceline floated off her perch, lifting the neck of her bass higher and throwing her head back in that way she often did that made her hair bounce and Bubblegum secretly like that, as well as the way the moonlight danced off her locks like the sun dances off a Rainicorn and she was hovering in exactly the right place to look like those statue wings were actually her own. The princess slapped herself.

"_What we were, what we shared.  
We were perfect as a pair.  
I won't pretend but in the end  
You didn't wanna see me aga… ain…"_

The bass line trailed off, as did Marceline's singing. She stared blankly at Bubblegum and Bubblegum stared back, both at a loss for words. Princess Bubblegum shook her head vigorously and remembered what she'd come here to say. She scowled.

"Marceline! What do you think you're doing here?"

"Uh, practicing," Marceline replied, holding her bass up by the neck and waving it in front of her. "You know I like to play my bass in graveyards sometimes."

"Even the dead don't want to hear your awful music."

"Pssh! Like you know anything about music. You're too busy playing with your stupid science toys to appreciate the art of music."

"Why you!" Princess Bubblegum clenched her teeth and her face started to turn red. "I know all about the art of music! I was taught by the finest tutors in the entire Candy Kingdom."

"Music is more than notes and patterns and math, you know," Marceline retorted, leaning back and floating around the statue. "Music has to have feeling. A song with structure is nothing if it doesn't have meaning. Didn't you get that, Bonnibel?"

Marceline hovered in front of Princess Bubblegum and smirked right in her face. Bubblegum huffed. "Well then, please do enlighten me."

"What?"

"Since you claim to have knowledge superior to that of the greatest composers of the Candy Kingdom, why don't you explain to me the 'art of music'? Tell me about that song you were just singing."

Marceline regarded her with a blank expression.

"Well?"

Marceline blinked and in an instant her face became demonic. "That song is personal! You had no right to eavesdrop on me! Why are you even here?"

"Au contraire, it is you who is trespassing on the lands of _my_ kingdom. I have the right to be wherever I want a listen to whomever I choose."

"You're such a snob!"

"You're so temperamental!"

"See? This is why we didn't work."

The princess gasped. "You promised we wouldn't talk about _us_ ever again!" she hissed.

"There wasn't really ever an 'us'. It was just you, you, you and _your_ kingdom and _your_ feelings and _your _wants. You didn't care about me."

Princess Bubblegum's jaw dropped. "Excuse me?! You're the real problem you arrogant, narcissistic, blood-sucking psychopath! I never really liked you anyway."

Contrary to what Bubblegum expected, Marceline floated backwards and stared at Bubblegum sadly. "Is that true?"

Princess Bubblegum gulped and suddenly her heart began to feel heavy. "Well… not entirely," she said, deciding to just be as honest as possible. "Actually, the answer is no. I do kind of like you and I appreciate you still being my friend after everything we've been through. But sometimes you just don't understand how dire the responsibilities of being ruler of the Candy Kingdom are. It's written in our sacred law that the princess must one day take the hand of a man to become her king and you're not a man. If I fail to do this by my twenty-first birthday, I risk losing my right to the throne and the Earl of Lemongrab will take over my duties. Nobody wants that."

"But you're the princess now!" Marceline argued. "You can change the laws of your own kingdom."

Bubblegum sighed in exasperation. "No, it's far more complicated than that. It'll take at least a whole day to explain the whole process. The point is that we just can't be… well… 'we' anymore. Ever."

"If that's how you felt then you should have just thrown away the shirt," Marceline huffed, turning around and crossing her arms. She began to float away, intending to just leave.

"I wouldn't dream of it!" the princess blurted out, making the vampire queen spare her another look. Bubblegum blushed. "I mean… somewhere inside of me, I still think you're one of the most important people in the world. I like having that piece of you close by."

Marceline smiled tenderly before she could stop herself. "Well, I never told you this either, but I still have your ring."

Bubblegum gasped. "My royal ensign? The one I gave you?"

"Yeah. I kept it safe all this time."

"Aw. That's sweet, Marce."

"Hey, you called me 'Marce' again."

Bubblegum turned away and fidgeted with her science project. Marceline looked around awkwardly. They were totally alone right now.

"Um… you know, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea if we got back together again," said Marceline.

Bubblegum looked up again with wide eyes. "But the laws!"

"We'll find a way around it. We can look into it a bit, see if there's a loophole or a special way to change them. And maybe Finn and Jake can help."

"They'd only be of any help if there's an adventure involved."

"And there might be! But this time, can we try? I mean, really try?"

Bubblegum took in the hopeful look in Marceline's eyes. Her heart rose back into its rightful place and begged her to say yes and make everything just the way it used to be. Right at the moment that she opened her mouth to say something, a loud snarl cut her off. She turned around and gaped at the huge, white rose monster that was crashing through the graveyard towards them, gnashing its razor sharp teeth and swinging its thorny arms. The two young women stared at it in disbelief.

"This guy a friend of yours?" Marceline eventually asked.


	2. Undead

**Undead**

"WWOOOAAAAAOOOOUUUU!"

A haunting moan drifted among the forest trees. The eerie noise sent all of the night creatures back to their roosts, nests and dens and would have sent a shiver down any warm-blooded creature's spine. It was lucky, then, that Marceline wasn't warm-blooded. She set her bass down against the trunk of a nearby tree and scouted for the source of the noise. The sound seemed to come from everywhere but Marceline didn't have to look very far in the end to find out where the voice came from.

"WWWRRRRRAAAAAAOOOOOOOUUUUURR RGGGHH!"

A silvery spectre wandered out of the woods, hovering above the bushes and wailing as creepily as she could. Her long hair billowed around her and the torn hem of her dress brushed against the leaves of the undergrowth. A crown, that was just a pale and transparent as the rest of her, floated above her head as she moved. Marceline laughed. It was just the new Ghost Princess haunting this mortal plane.

"Hey, GP, what's up?" the Vampire Queen asked.

"WWWOOOOAAAAA!"

"C'mon, GP. You know that doesn't scare me."

The Ghost Princess sighed. "I know, Marceline. But I have to try. I'm cursed to haunt this kingdom until I can pass on to the 50th Dead World. You know that."

Marceline nodded. "I know. But you'd be better off finding someone else to haunt. You know, someone who'd actually be scared of you. Why don't you just go into town and rattle some people's stuff?"

Ghost Princess shook her head. "I've already haunted some people in town. Oh, it's no good. Every time I try to scare someone I end up apologising and now nobody is afraid of me. Besides, they're all sleeping now."

"Then just wake them up with some chain rattling. Or push something off a shelf. They don't need to know it was you, so they can still be scared."

"I don't want wake them up at this time of night!" Ghost Princess exclaimed. She sighed and floated down to lie across the ground.

"Careful, Ghost Princess, you might sink," said Marceline.

"For some reason, I can't bring myself to truly scare those people," Ghost Princess lamented. She sat up and stared at the torn hem of her dress. "I wonder why that is. Oh, if only I could remember who I was and how I died."

"But then you'd pass on to the 50th Dead World."

"Yes. I can't wait for that day," Ghost Princess said, looking up with a shine in her eyes and gazing wistfully at the few stars she could see between the leaves of the canopy.

"Don't worry, you'll get there soon," Marceline assured her, reaching out to stroke the ghost's hair. Her fingers slipped through the locks as if there was nothing there. The Vampire Queen frowned sadly. At one time, it wasn't possible to run her fingers through that thick, sticky hair but she could stroke it and her fingers would come away coated with the sweetest sugar in the entire kingdom. It used to smell and taste like strawberry bubble gum and sometimes it took all of the self-control she could muster to not just bite it all off and blow it into the biggest bubble gum bubble ever. The ghost princess sighed.

"You know, Marceline, sometimes when I look at you or hear you playing your bass I think I start to remember things. Something about you feels so familiar."

"Maybe we crossed paths once. I _am_ over three thousand years old."

Ghost Princess nodded and sighed audibly. "Would you play your bass for me? Please?"

Marceline chuckled. "Sure thing, GP." She floated over to her bass and picked it up, playing the starting notes of a familiar old song.

When dawn came Ghost Princess drifted back to her grave and Marceline returned home before the sun came over the horizon and burned her. Every encounter with the princess made her feel low and guilty. Marceline had the power to put an end to her torment. The Vampire Princess had been there on that fateful day when her soul rose from the deceased corpse and began her aimless wandering. Marceline knew everything she needed to know to pass on and yet she wouldn't tell her. She told herself that the only reason was because she _couldn't_ tell. If Ghost Princess passed on there would be nothing left of that woman and Marceline didn't want to let go of her beloved bubble gum princess.

* * *

**This is a future-fic btw... in case you were confused.**


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